Cardboard spheres starting to post up!

Sarah has a good sampling of how to post images of your work and write about your experience.

January 19th 2011 – January 22nd 2011
Contrary to my initial thought before working with it, cardboard in its essence is a very proud and noble material with quite the ego and found out it must be treated as such. As a matter of fact I should probably capitalize it. Used to when I thought of Cardboard I for some reason always just saw a box, a dirty, dented and ripped up just not at all pristine. Now though I respect it a lot more. Trying to make my first sphere was an experience. The best part was letting the cardboard be a box as it wanted but persuading it to become a sphere. However, once it realized you were tricking it into becoming round, something by nature it is not, it seemed as if it got highly offended and insulted. The work got harder; it’d bend where it was crucial it didn’t and so on. Luckily Cardboard doesn’t hold grudges and it simmered down to work properly again.

Brian has a good write up sample of his process.

3D Project #1 Process: 3D Project #1 interests me quite a bit, and so I invested a good amount of time in exploring the various ways in which one can create a sphere out of cardboard. Eventually I came across an object called the Geodesic Dome, a sphere created by connecting a large combination of triangles which are slightly curved. I eventually ended up using a design for a paper half-dome created out of hexagons, however I did not fully understand the complications of taking that design from the flexible medium of paper to the rigid material of cardboard. Eventually i finished the first sphere with the Geodesic design, however it is not a perfect sphere due to imperfections in my cuts, and it took almost double the time I had intended for it to take. Still, it was an interesting look into how complicated things can become. For the second “inner” sphere, I created a small square to serve as the core of the sphere, and then glued long strands of cardboard onto the square in an attempt to create a sphere of cardboard strands; this design actually ended up working fairly well. For the third “no glue” sphere, I created various planes out of cardboard and then used a slot system in order to create a simple sphere; simplicity seemed to be a good attribute to try and reach with this particular sphere, and I think it was achieved. However, even slight errors made when cutting the slots turned assembly into quite a task, but eventually it came together.